Why does Camel's Hump have two humps?
Photographs: Niranjan Arminius, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 · Niranjan Arminius, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 · John Nicholas LeCounte Anderson, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
How glaciers, Abenaki names and a 1905 gift from Joseph Battell shaped Vermont's most recognized mountain.
Two Humps, One Mountain
At 4,083 feet, Camel's Hump ties with Mount Ellen for the third-highest summit in Vermont. Ten acres of alpine tundra crown the peak, the centerpiece of Camel's Hump State Park. The mountain stands apart from neighboring summits, both in height and in outline, and its profile is probably the most recognized in the state.
In 1999 a seven-person panel chose Camel's Hump for the Vermont state quarter, saying the mountain was wild and natural like the Vermont countryside, and unique and asymmetrical like the independent and quirky reputation of Vermonters. The choice fixed the shape in the pockets of millions who have never climbed it.
Unlike Mount Mansfield, which has a toll road and a ski resort, Camel's Hump is reached only by trail. The summit remains a place of rock, tundra and long views, without road access or facilities at the top, so visitors should plan to walk in and walk out, carrying what they need for the day.
How the Ice Shaped It
The mountain's reputation rests more on its shape than its height. Cut off from neighboring peaks by the Winooski Valley and smoothed by glaciers, Camel's Hump actually has two humps, not one: the southern hump is higher, and a steep drop falls away to the south where passing ice quarried the rock.
Geologists call this kind of asymmetrical, glacier-shaped hill a roche moutonnée: gentle and scoured on the side the ice approached from, steep and plucked on the far side where blocks of rock were torn away. The bedrock itself is phyllite, quartzite and schist, laid down and folded long before the glaciers ever reached the Green Mountains.
In 1968 the National Park Service designated Camel's Hump a National Natural Landmark, calling it an exceptional illustration of the complex folding that built the Green Mountains. The landmark covers about five thousand three hundred acres, reaching from the bare summit down to roughly 2,500 feet in elevation, well below the treeline.
Names Across the Centuries
The Abenaki were the first to describe the shape, calling the mountain Moziozagan, the moose's shoulder. Another Abenaki name, Tawabodiiwajo, is translated as resting place or sit-down place. In 1609 Samuel de Champlain named it Le Lion Couchant, the resting lion, after its profile as seen from the Vermont shore of Lake Champlain.
Ira Allen labeled it Camel's Rump on a map in 1798, and only in 1830 did the name Camel's Hump come into use. The federal Board on Geographic Names has discouraged the apostrophe in place names since 1890, so the mountain appears both ways on maps and signs; local usage keeps the apostrophe.
The name has traveled beyond the mountain itself. Vermont Public Radio once carried a children's show called Camel's Hump Radio, hosted by Bill Harley, and the mountain's profile appears in the coat of arms on the state flag. Few other peaks in Vermont are so easy to pick out from a car window.
Life on the Summit
Ten acres at the top support alpine tundra: Bigelow's sedge, alpine bilberry, mountain sandwort, crowberry, mountain cranberry and Labrador tea. These plants were once widespread across the region after the glaciers retreated and now survive only where the peak stays cold year-round, a fragile remnant of a much older climate.
Eighteen species near the summit are considered rare or very rare in Vermont, and five are protected under the state's endangered and threatened species rule. The Green Mountain Club pays a caretaker to live near the summit through the summer and to show hikers how to stay on the marked trail.
Visitors reaching the top should keep off the vegetation, even where it looks like bare ground between plants, since the tundra recovers slowly from foot traffic. Staying on rock and the marked path protects species that exist almost nowhere else in the state, and it keeps the caretaker's work from going to waste.
The Forest Below
The slopes carry a history of their own. Logging in the late 1800s stripped much of the lower mountain, and a major fire in 1903 burned further across the terrain. Red spruce survives today in meaningful numbers across the lower forest, a visible recovery from more than a century ago.
From the 1960s, Hub Vogelmann and his students at the University of Vermont tracked a steady decline of red spruce on the mountain's west slope, year after year of careful measurement. His 1982 paper, titled Catastrophe on Camel's Hump, traced the dieback directly to acid rain falling on the forest.
The findings drew national attention to the problem and contributed to a revision of the federal Clean Air Act. Camel's Hump became, in effect, a long-running outdoor laboratory as well as a hiking destination, and researchers have continued to study its forests since, watching how the red spruce recovers over time.
A Mountain Given to the State
In 1905 the publisher and philanthropist Joseph Battell gave 1,200 acres of virgin forest on the mountain, including the summit itself, to the State of Vermont, asking that it be kept in a primitive state. A state forester took formal charge of the land in 1911, beginning more than a century of public stewardship.
A forest reserve enclosed the mountain in 1969, and by 1991 Camel's Hump State Park had grown to about twenty thousand acres, folding in the surrounding slopes, approach roads and trailheads that hikers rely on today when planning a climb, from the valley floor up to the far alpine summit.
Trail work on the mountain began when the Green Mountain Club was formed, and by 1912 a trail connected the mountain to Sterling Pond. That route later became part of the Long Trail, which runs the length of the Green Mountains and is covered in more detail elsewhere on this site.
The Trails Up, and the View From the Top
Two trailheads carry most traffic: the Burrows Trailhead east of Huntington and the Monroe Trailhead south of Duxbury. In 2016 almost twenty-six thousand hikers signed the registers at those two trailheads combined, a measure of how popular the climb has become among visitors exploring the Green Mountains each hiking season.
The Burrows Trail climbs the west face for about two miles to reach the Long Trail, then turns a short way south to the summit; it is the shortest and steepest approach. The Forest City Trail follows an old logging road once used by the Forest City Lumber Company, and the Monroe Trail climbs the east face, joined by the Dean Trail and the Alpine Trail.
The Alpine Trail passes the site of a bomber crash: in October 1944 a B-24J Liberator from Westover Air Force Base in Massachusetts struck the mountain about a hundred feet below the summit, killing nine crew members and leaving one survivor; a wing section still lies at the site. The longest single climb on the Long Trail begins at the parking lot on Duxbury Road, a one-way trip of about six and a half miles with more than three thousand six hundred feet of elevation change.
From the top, on a clear day, a hiker can see the highest peaks of three states: Mount Marcy in New York, Mount Washington in New Hampshire, and Mansfield in Vermont. Plan for a full day, carry layers for changing weather, and check trail and park conditions with the Green Mountain Club or the state park office before setting out. The State House in Montpelier is a short drive east for those heading down afterward.
